He said the vaccine was found to be “very good” at protecting individuals “against clinically recognizable disease.” However, he said it was uncertain “at this point, that the vaccine protects you against getting infected.”
A popular video distorted Fauci’s remarks to falsely suggest that he said the vaccine doesn’t “protect you from covid.”
See, “Video Misinterprets Fauci’s Comments on COVID-19 Vaccine,” Jan. 26, 2021
In a May 2021 Senate hearing, Fauci estimated that “probably around 60%” of his NIAID colleagues had been vaccinated against COVID-19 at the time.Viral online posts distorted his comments to misleadingly claim that half of employees at federal health agencies “are refusing” the vaccines, which Fauci never said.
At the time, NIAID told us that 67% of the NIH staff were vaccinated, but the “actual number may be higher” because reporting was voluntary.
See, “Posts Distort Testimony of Federal Health Officials on Employee Vaccinations,” May 21, 2021
Hydroxychloroquine is an antimalarial drug that has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration as a treatment for COVID-19. But a Gateway Pundit story shared on Facebook in June 2021 declared, “SMOKING GUN: FAUCI LIED, MILLIONS DIED — Fauci Was Informed of Hydroxychloroquine Success in Early 2020 But Lied to Public Instead Despite the Science.”
The story was based on two emails that were sent to Fauci in February 2020. In one email, two doctors expressed the possibility that the drug could be effective against COVID-19. Fauci forwarded the email to an NIH deputy director who works in microbiology and infectious diseases and wrote: “Please take a look and respond to them. Thanks.”
In the other email, a pharmacologist made reference to “data from 2005 showing inhibition of SARS infection,” which is a different disease caused by a different coronavirus (SARS-CoV-1) from the one that leads to COVID-19. We previously wrote about a 2005 study that found the drug prevented the spread of that SARS virus in cell culture — which is not the same as working in humans.
Those emails are not evidence that hydroxychloroquine is effective against COVID-19, or that Fauci kept this from the public. In fact, randomized controlled trials — the highest standard of evidence — have found that hydroxychloroquine isn’t beneficial in treating hospitalized COVID-19 patients.
See, “Viral Posts, Pundits Distort Fauci Emails,” June 4, 2021
Remdesivir is an antiviral medication approved by the FDA to treat COVID-19. The drug was invented by the pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences, which receives any profit from sales of the drug as a treatment for COVID-19.
A viral social media post falsely claimed that Fauci was “pushing” remdesivir because he “invented” it with Bill Gates and they would profit from its use.
Fauci does not hold a patent for remdesivir, and a spokesperson for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation told USA Today that the foundation also was not involved in the invention or development of the drug.
See, “Fauci Didn’t Invent, Won’t Profit from Remdesivir,” May 21, 2020
Coronavirus Origins
It is still uncertain how SARS-CoV-2 originated, but many scientists suspect the virus “spilled over” into humans from an animal. There is no evidence the virus was created in a lab, let alone as part of any U.S.-funded research.
A June 2021 Facebook post claimed that “Fauci knew the virus was likely engineered,” because of an email he received from Kristian Andersen, a professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research. In that Jan. 31, 2020, email to Fauci, Andersen said that there were “unusual features” of “a really small part of the genome” of the coronavirus that “(potentially) look engineered.” He mentioned others, too, found “the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”
But Andersen said in his email that more analysis was necessary and “opinions could still change,” which is what later happened.
On March 17, 2020, Nature Medicine published an article by Andersen and other scientists that said they determined that the coronavirus likely originated through “natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic transfer,” or “natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer.” The authors added that they “do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” because they “observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features … in related coronaviruses in nature.”
See, “Viral Posts, Pundits Distort Fauci Emails,” June 4, 2021
Former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro falsely claimed that Fauci “killed a lot of people” by funding some bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The institute is in Wuhan, China, where the first COVID-19 cases were identified.
NIAID did provide a multimillion-dollar grant to fund some of the lab’s research, but the NIH has explained that those experiments could not have led to the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 because the viruses that were being studied were very different.
“Analysis of published genomic data and other documents from the grantee demonstrate that the naturally occurring bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant are genetically far distant from SARS-CoV-2 and could not possibly have caused the COVID-19 pandemic,” then-NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins said in an Oct. 20, 2021, statement, referring to an analysis posted to the NIAID’s website. “Any claims to the contrary are demonstrably false.”
See, “Navarro Falsely Links Fauci to Pandemic Origin,” May 19, 2022
Republican Sen. Rand Paul accused Fauci of lying when Fauci said in a May 2021 Senate hearing that “the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” But there’s no evidence that Fauci lied to Congress, as Paul asserted in a July 20, 2021, hearing, about funding gain-of-function research — which the U.S. government generallydefined in 2014as aimingto “increase the ability of infectious agents to cause disease by enhancing its pathogenicity or by increasing its transmissibility.”
Fauci has said that the research that was funded “was judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain-of-function,” and the NIH has said the same. The issue is that scientists have differing opinions on what counts as gain-of-function research.
Paul has posited that Fauci, among others, “could be culpable for the entire pandemic,” if the SARS-CoV-2 virus leaked from a Wuhan lab that was conducting gain-of-function research. But there is no proof of a lab leak, and there is evidence that the bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant could not have caused the pandemic.
See, “The Wuhan Lab and the Gain-of-Function Disagreement,” May 21, 2021, and “Fauci and Paul, Round 2,” July 22, 2021
In December 2014, the NIH posted a photo of Fauci and former President Barack Obama touring the NIH Vaccine Research Center at the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland. The photo showed Obama speaking about Ebola research with Dr. Nancy Sullivan, of NIAID, and Fauci was shown standing next to Sylvia Burwell, who was the health and human services secretary at the time.
But the years-old photo was circulated in 2020 along with the false claim that the image showed “Dr. Fauci, Melinda Gates and Barack Obama at the Wuhan Lab in 2015,” suggesting a connection to the COVID-19 pandemic.
See, “Old Photo Shows Obama, Fauci at U.S. Facility — Not ‘Wuhan Lab,'”July 17, 2020
Other Claims
A series of reports in 2021 from a group that opposes federal funding for research relying on animal testing prompted dozens of readers to ask us if Fauci had a history of cruelty to animals, specifically beagles.
The NIAID admitted to FactCheck.org in a statement that Fauci was involved in the process of awarding funding for a number of research projects that used beagles as test subjects. But the agency denied that it funded one particular project in Tunisia that went viral on social media because of images from a published study that showed sedated beagles with their heads stuck in mesh cages filled with diseased sand flies.
See, “Answering Questions About #BeagleGate,” Nov. 2, 2021
Fauci is among the many federal employees who are required to submit an annual public financial disclosure report to their employing agency or department. His reports — which list his assets, income, employment agreements and other financial information — are available upon request from the NIH’s FOIA office.
But in a January congressional hearing, Republican Sen. Roger Marshall asked Fauci if he would be willing to publicly release “a financial disclosure form,” suggesting that Fauci’s reports are not available to the public and are being hidden by “the big tech giants.”
See, “Fauci’s Financial Disclosure Forms Are Publicly Available,” Jan. 12, 2022
In 2005, Fauci told the Associated Press that he donates royalty payments he receives from the licensees of products and treatments he helped develop while working for the NIH.
But that detail was not mentioned in a number of May posts about reporting on millions of dollars in royalties paid to Fauci and other NIH scientists since 2009.
